I am hoping that someone can clarify what is happening here for me. I dug around in the integer class for a bit but because integer is overriding the +
operator I could not figure out what was going wrong. My problem is with this line:
Integer i = 0;
i = i + 1; // ← I think that this is somehow creating a new object!
Here is my reasoning: I know that java is pass by value (or pass by value of reference), so I think that in the following example the integer object should be incremented each time.
public class PassByReference {
public static Integer inc(Integer i) {
i = i+1; // I think that this must be **sneakally** creating a new integer...
System.out.println("Inc: "+i);
return i;
}
public static void main(String[] args) {
Integer integer = new Integer(0);
for (int i =0; i<10; i++){
inc(integer);
System.out.println("main: "+integer);
}
}
}
This is my expected output:
Inc: 1 main: 1 Inc: 2 main: 2 Inc: 3 main: 3 Inc: 4 main: 4 Inc: 5 main: 5 Inc: 6 main: 6 ...
This is the actual output.
Inc: 1 main: 0 Inc: 1 main: 0 Inc: 1 main: 0 ...
Why is it behaving like this?
There are two problems:
Integer#set(i)
. You could otherwise just make use of it.To get it to work, you need to reassign the return value of the inc()
method.
integer = inc(integer);
To learn a bit more about passing by value, here's another example:
public static void main(String... args) {
String[] strings = new String[] { "foo", "bar" };
changeReference(strings);
System.out.println(Arrays.toString(strings)); // still [foo, bar]
changeValue(strings);
System.out.println(Arrays.toString(strings)); // [foo, foo]
}
public static void changeReference(String[] strings) {
strings = new String[] { "foo", "foo" };
}
public static void changeValue(String[] strings) {
strings[1] = "foo";
}